Advanced Process Control

Yokogawa has provided hundreds of licenses, consulting & engineering services for a variety of process units over the past nearly 20 years. Yokogawa understands that better integration with APC and DCS results in more profitable operations and that regulatory control stabilization is important as a baseline for a control hierarchy.

Through a long and extensive partnership, Yokogawa and Shell, one of the world’s leading pioneers in development and application of Advanced Control Technologies in the Energy Industry, teamed together in the development of our APC platform. This platform was developed as a standardized solution to be implemented across all of Shell's global assets.

The partnership in advanced process control leverages the strengths of each company: the advanced process control technology that Shell has acquired by operating its plants, and the real-time control technology that Yokogawa has developed as a control system supplier.

The result has led to an all-inclusive state-of-the-art technology and solutions package expected to help all customers achieve dramatic improvements in productivity.

Customer Challenge

Why is APC Important?

It is widely known in the industry that by stabilizing the process you can then maximize profit, but as the plant operation complexity increased requiring frequent feed stock/rate and product grade changes, we are reaching limits of human capacity whilst total numbers of operators are being reduced but they are expected to handle over 300 control loops.

Multi-Variable Control (MVC) is the key component of an APC system, that enables optimum process stabilization, resulting in increased productivity. MVC achieves this by predictive control using process dynamic models, which is proven to increase throughput, save energy, and reduce quality giveaway. As the MVC control strategies vary, our experienced APC engineers work closely with experts on the side of our customers to ensure successful and seamless implementation.

By utilizing MVC we can transfer the workload from the operator to the control, by making this transition we can control the process at a higher frequency whilst allowing the operator to focus on higher value operations

Estimating quality from the process value in real time helps us to directly control the quality; controlling the quality close to the limit results in increased yield.

Customer Benefits

Tacit Knowledge, Expertise, Experience and Know-How

Yokogawa, as a DCS and Analyzers supplier, understands that better integration between APC, DCS and Process Analyzers results in more profitable operations, thus passing on this knowledge to our customers to create more efficient, productive, and reliable operations.

Shell has standardized on the new APC platform across all global assets. In particular the off-line design tools and the on-line optimization solver are provided by Shell while the on-line operation HMI is provided by Yokogawa. Yokogawa brings this tacit knowledge to the global market, providing implementation and consulting services to all global customers.

Yokogawa has nearly 20 years experience with Shell providing APC services - through these we've seen typical ROI from 6-12 months or 10-25 cents/bbl crude in refinery etc